The regulation of the phosphorylation/dephosphorylation process, resulting in 'cellular switches' that monitor normal plant physiology, growth and development, has immense potential in crop systems. With much of the information in the nascent stages, coming largely from Arabidopsis and rice particularly,  the use of cell biology, genetic screens, biochemical approaches aided by an omics approach should help unravel the detail functional information available about signaling pathways in plants. The regulation could be exploited to develop crop varieties better equipped to handle changing environments and enhance agricultural productivity.

        In the post-genomic era, one of the major challenges is investigation and understanding of multiple genes and gene families regulating a particular physiological and developmental aspect of plant life cycle. One of the important physiological processes is regulation of stress response, which leads to adaptation or adjustment in response to adverse stimuli. With the holistic understanding of the signaling pathways involving phosphatases, one gene family or multiple genes or gene families, plant biologist can lay a foundation for designing and generating future crops, which can withstand the higher degree of environmental stresses. Especially abiotic stresses, which are the major cause of crop loss throughout the world without losing crop yield and productivity.

This book incorporates the contributions from leading plant biologists in the field of stress-mediated dephosphorylation by phosphatases as an important task to elucidate the aspects of stress signaling by functional genomic approaches.

Girdhar K. Pandey received his B.Sc. (Hon.) in Biochemistry from Delhi University in 1992 and M.Sc. in Biotechnology in year 1994 from Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Subsequently, he joined Ph.D. in the School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and worked in the field of calcium signal transduction under abiotic stresses in plants.  He was awarded the Ph.D. degree in year 1999 and then pursued post-doctoral career at Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California at Berkeley in the year, 2000. There, he extended his work in the field of calcium mediated signaling in Arabidopsis by studying CBL-CIPKs, phosphatases, channels/transporters, and transcription factors involved in abiotic stresses. Currently, he is working as Professor in the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, Delhi University South Campus. 
Pandey's research interests involve detail mechanistic interplay of signal transduction networks in plant under mineral nutrient deficiency (mostly potassium, calcium and nitrate) and abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity and oxidative stresses induced by heavy metals. His laboratory is working on the coding and decoding of mineral nutrient deficiency and abiotic stress signals by studying several signaling components such as calcium sensors such as calcineurin B-like (CBL) and CBL-interacting protein kinases (CIPK), phosphatases (mainly PP2C and DSP), transcription factors (AP2-domain containing or ERF, WRKY), transporters and channels proteins (potassium and calcium channels/transporters) in both Arabidopsis and rice. The long-term goal of his research group is to establish the mechanistic interplay and cross talk of mineral nutrient deficient conditions and different abiotic stress signaling cascades in Arabidopsis and rice model system by using the advance tools of bio-informatics, genetics, cell biology, biochemistry and physiology with greater emphasis on functional genomics approaches.